


It's the goddamn fight of my life and you started it.

by ivy_gold_rush



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: Body Image, Bullying, Eating Disorders, Explicit Language, Gen, Homophobia, M/M, Season 2, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:02:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28148784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivy_gold_rush/pseuds/ivy_gold_rush
Summary: No-longer-new transfer student Nikolai Kim has four things he hopes to accomplish by the end of his junior year at Liberty High School:1. Make everyone realize how being the only male cheerleader at school requires a ridiculous amount of tenacity and perseverance.2. Put an end to a malicious rumor involving him and a certain jock that's been circulating the hallways for months now.3. Convince his parents to let him come out of retirement and audition for pre-professional ballet schools again.4. Get the hell out of shitty Crestmont, preferably back to his hometown of Brooklyn, New York.He knows this is a tall order for anyone to undertake in less than three months, but he is nothing if not driven.
Kudos: 3





	It's the goddamn fight of my life and you started it.

* * *

Nikolai took a deep breath and glared resolutely down the length of the mat, mentally visualizing a clean, stuck landing at the end of his tumbling pass. A second later, he took off, lunging into a round-off before propelling himself into a back handspring. But as much as he tried, he simply couldn’t get enough rebound to wrench around the tucked backflip, and he ended up slamming his knees on the mat.

He had yet to recover from the shock of falling to the ground when he began to hear laughter and disingenuous cheering coming from the bleachers. Nikolai didn’t even need to look in that direction to know that Bryce Walker, Montgomery de la Cruz, Scott Reed, and their militia of sycophantic male athletes were sneering at his latest blunder. The jocks often came here after football and baseball practice to leer at the girls, but making fun of the only male cheerleader at Liberty High, and an openly gay one at that, was an added incentive most of them couldn’t pass up.

Mortified about making a mistake on such a simple tumbling run, Nikolai wanted nothing more than to get up from the mat and walk away discreetly, but he forced himself to stay put at the center of the gym as Chloe Rice started to give him feedback.

“ _Nick_ , your tumbling consistency needs work, but your form was great as usual. I thought your toe point and knee extensions looked very nice, and I also liked how you kept your legs together the whole time.”

One of the guys, he was almost sure it was Monty, cackled audibly at the last part of Chloe’s critique. Suppressing the urge to roll his eyes, Nikolai gave the cheer captain a tight smile and replied.

“Thanks, Chloe. Don’t worry, I’ll get that pass figured out by the game on Friday. I promise.”

The cheer captain seemed satisfied with Nikolai’s reassurance and he was finally allowed to join the girls who had gone before him. To his relief, they were sitting on the bleachers opposite from where the jocks were hanging out. He spent the remainder of practice observing the rest of his teammates tumble across the mat with relative ease. Nikolai hoped that by watching them carefully he could pick up on some sort of technique that could help him improve his apparent weakness. With a height of 6’1 and a slender, willowy build, he knew he could never generate the same power and amplitude as the most proficient cheerleaders, male or female, who were typically on the shorter side.

* * *

Nikolai couldn’t help but draw parallels between his current predicament with cheerleading and his memories of taking gymnastics as a child. His mother Yulia was a former rhythmic gymnast who took on coaching after she retired from competition. Nikolai sometimes accompanied her to work where he marveled at her students as they seamlessly combined intricate apparatus tricks with choreography and music. Nikolai pleaded incessantly with his mom to let him take gymnastics lessons. She agreed, but since rhythmic gymnastics is an all-female sport, his mother enrolled him in a men’s artistic gymnastics program instead.

He could barely conceal his dismay when learned that men’s gymnastics did not allow athletes to incorporate dance or music into their routines. Nikolai simply did not understand why being a boy meant he couldn’t tell a story or express his emotions through pretty movements like the girls in rhythmic and artistic gymnastics did. Needless to say, he harbored very little enthusiasm for the sport. It wasn’t like the coaches thought much about his potential, anyway. They frequently yelled at him for making consistent errors on his vault and floor acrobatic skills, which they blamed on the fact that he was the tallest kid in his age group. Finally, after a dreadful showing at a local competition, Nikolai wept to Yulia about how he’d much rather be a dancer than a gymnast.

Shortly afterward, Nikolai went to his first ballet lesson in a cramped dance studio in Brooklyn where he instantly became enamored with the art form. His teachers quickly took note of his precocious artistry and musicality, as well as his propensity for difficult turns and leaps. Three years after he started dancing, Nikolai successfully auditioned for a highly competitive pre-professional ballet school in New York City and also received a full scholarship to attend.

From Mondays to Saturdays, Nikolai embarked on an hour-long subway commute from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. He spent morning-to-night painstakingly refining his technique under the syllabus of the Vaganova method and took supplementary classes in contemporary and jazz dance. Nikolai pushed through sporadic bouts of pain and exhaustion by envisioning all of the great opera houses he would perform in once he achieved his dream of becoming a principal dancer: the Bolshoi, Mariinsky, Opera Garnier, La Scala, and Covent Garden.

But his parents threw a wrench in his plans when they claimed to notice a drastic change in his behavior and temperament, which Nikolai thought was complete bullshit. Convinced that his training was doing more harm than good, they decided to withdraw him from the school, effectively making him a retired ballet dancer at just fifteen years old. A year and three months later, Nikolai was in for another surprise as his father Sergei convinced his mother to move the family out of Brighton Beach and relocate to a small town in Northern California named Crestmont.

Nikolai assumed that reacting graciously to his parents’ completely abrupt decision to uproot their entire lives to the West Coast would make them more suggestible to the idea of him pursuing ballet again. But as soon as he expressed interest in auditioning for the ballet school in San Francisco, they shut him down immediately. The same thing happened when he showed them a flyer for recreational dance classes at a local competitive dance studio.

Honestly, he still couldn’t believe he managed to convince his mother and father to let him try out for Liberty High’s cheerleading squad at the beginning of the school year. But he knew his working-class, immigrant parents would listen as soon as he mentioned putting down cheer as an extracurricular activity on his college applications. They probably thought Nikolai had finally given up on wanting to join a professional ballet company now that he considered college an option.

* * *

Lingering for another thirty minutes after everyone else had already left, Nikolai continued to practice the round-off back handspring to back-tuck without much success. Trying to placate his negative self-talk, Nikolai began to list all the strengths that landed him a spot on the cheerleading squad.

“Obviously, given your background, you’re pretty adept at picking up choreography. You know damn well you can easily dance circles around the next-best girl. Considering how hip-hop isn’t even the style you used to train in, that’s clearly something to take pride in. You’re hyperflexible, meaning you can pull off those jumps with an oversplit and gain a significant amount of time in the air. Last but not least, your experience with pas-de-deux pretty much makes you an ideal base for the squad. You have no trouble lifting and tossing the flyers so they can perform their stunts.”

Even though Nikolai realized he was nowhere near useless to the team, the feeling of anger and embarrassment still wouldn’t subside. His mind just kept replaying the scene of him falling and getting taunted by the popular guys earlier.

“If you don’t get your shit together, you can add ‘failed cheerleader’ right next to failed dancer and failed gymnast on your CV,” he chastised himself in his head.

Sighing dramatically, he headed for the locker room grateful that, if nothing else, he could at least take a shower and get changed without other people around. Besides the casual homophobia, the biggest downside to being a male cheerleader was that he had to share all the athletic facilities with the members of whatever jock-heavy sport was in-season, which in this case was baseball.

But apparently, Nikolai couldn’t even have solitude, for as soon as he reached the locker room entrance, he could hear raucous noise emanating from inside. Fuck this. Turning on his heels, the cheerleader tried to leave undetected, but he was already spotted by Bryce Walker who instantly called after him.

“Aw, _Nicky_ , buddy, don’t go.

Before he could protest, Monty came up from behind and wrapped his arm around his shoulder, forcing him to sit on a bench facing all the jocks. _Seriously, isn’t this dude supposed to be a homophobe?_

Along with Bryce, Monty, and Scott was Zach Dempsey who, to his credit, is somewhat nice to him in their two classes together. But at the same time, he has played a bystander in too many of these confrontations with his friends for Nikolai to have much respect for him.

Staring at Nikolai with a devilish grin that seemed practically imprinted on his face, Monty took the initiative to begin today’s round of interrogation.

“So where’s our favorite cheerleader heading off to next? Ballet practice?”

Nikolai had to curse at his own naïvety for mentioning ballet when the teachers made everyone share “fun facts” about themselves back in August.

“Can we watch you change into your tights?” the bully added provokingly.

“Nah man, he’d rather show you his pink tutu,” Scott winked at him suggestively.

At this point, Nikolai knew they wouldn’t let him leave unless he answered back. In the most condescending tone he could muster, he retorted:

“First of all, nobody calls it ' _ballet practice_ , _'_ and second, don’t you guys have to wear jockstraps and athletic cups for football and baseball? I wouldn’t talk shit about boys who wear tights, or tutus for that matter if I were you.” _Thank god they’ve never heard of dance belts_.

“Oh yeah, I bet you wanna see me in a jockstrap, huh?” Monty said.

Nikolai was quick to it. “Not at all. Actually, please do us all a favor and never put your bare ass on display. This place already smells bad enough as it is.”

The other three boys promptly cracked up at his comeback, with Zach and even Bryce appearing particularly impressed. Monty was momentarily caught off guard, but it didn’t take long for the self-satisfied smirk to reappear on his face. Now addressing his friends, Monty attempted to redirect the subject of mockery back to Nikolai.

“He’s only saying that because he wants some booty from Scotty instead. We all know Nicky’s still got a crush on him,” nudging his embarrassed friend who feebly told him to shut up in response.

At this point, Nikolai was growing increasingly confident with his bitchy insults, and he was ready to finish the bastard off.

 _“Booty from Scotty_?” Seriously?” he scoffed disdainfully before continuing. “Wow, the remedial English teacher really needs to do something about that second-grade level vocabulary of yours. And regarding your last comment, that all depends on your recommendation, Monty. Surely, I could use some input from a guy who spends his entire day staring at Scott’s ass.”

In an instant, Monty’s jaw clenched and his hazel eyes darkened with rage. Nikolai could swear he saw a hint of something else too, fear perhaps? Bryce, who had stayed quiet for most of the argument, had an expression that pretty much said “Oh shit, you’re dead now, man.”

“What the fuck did you say to me, faggot?” Monty growled.

The cheerleader braced himself for the beating of a lifetime when, to his surprise, Zach jumped into action and managed to restrain both of Monty’s arms, all while shouting at Bryce and Scott to help get him out. Monty thrashed his body violently, struggling to break free from Zach’s grasp to no avail.

The three boys escorted Monty out of the locker room, presumably to calm him down outside. Amidst the shouted obscenities and slurs, Nikolai could overhear Bryce giving Monty some sort of pseudo-paternal moral support. Ironic, considering how he instigated the whole thing and then let his underling do all the dirty work.

As soon as he was sure they were gone, Nikolai grabbed his stuff from his locker and quickly left the room, now too afraid to stay and take a shower. It rapidly dawned on him how terrifying the situation escalated to and his chest began to heave in rapid, shallow breaths. He could still feel his legs tremble as he stumbled his way out of the school building.

He caught Zach Dempsey staring at him at the parking lot, and it looked as if he wanted to come up and say something. But right now, Nikolai was feeling too overwhelmed to talk to him, much less have a full-blown conversation about what just transpired. So Nikolai simply trudged past him, not bothering to turn around as Zach repeatedly called out his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I hope you all enjoy the first fanfic I've written in over a decade. <3
> 
> 2\. The work title is a line from the song ivy by Taylor Swift. Every chapter title will be a lyric from folklore or evermore.
> 
> 3\. I would like to write descriptions of Nikolai's performances. If you have experience with ballet or cheerleading, please give me advice on the technical and choreographic side of things.


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